Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, Second Edition

Chapter FiveThe ManuIn The Nisitory of Sexwlitp., Volume l, Foucault describes the productionor "deployment" of human sexuality. By "deployment" he means twothings: first, the discursive and disciplinary implanting or engendering ofthe idea that human beings have an objentive sexual nature. Second, thediscursive and disciplinary construction and dissemination ol a particularaccount of that sexual nature. Foucaultk main concern is that deploynlentof sexuality generates norms that condition much of human thought andbehavior.The History of Smuulity lays out how a norm-based sexuality was developedand made into the truth about sex. The book is short and lacks thewelter of detail given in Discipline and Punish. The difference is due in parttu a change in Foucaultk mehod, and in part to his planning the history ofsexuality as a six-volume vvorkJ Zt is in the first volume that we find the genealogicaltreatment of sexuality, The second and third (published) volumes,The Use of Pleasure and The C~re of the Self; are ethical works inFowcaulr's rather proprietary sense, In Volume 1, he paints a picture of theworkings of power relations that is more compressed and explicit than thatoffered in Discipline and Punkh. He shows how power manufactures aparticular subjectivity by producing norms and self-images tbat people internalizeand take as the truth about themselves as sexual beings,The easy way to understand The Histor31 of Sex~ality is to take the bookas only about beliefs and perceptions, To do so is to read Foucault as if heis concerned that we misconstrue our objective sexual natue and attemptingto correct that miscsfiserual. This is a serious misinterprctatian. Unfortunately,it is also a very common misinterpretation. It is the most commonmisinterpretation on the part of those who first encounter Foucault's workin The Nktory of Sex~~lity. F~ucauIt explicitly challenges the idea of anobjective sexual nature: ""l is precisely this idea of sex in ibelifchat we can-